The Mysterious Hat

Today I'll go into a bit more detail on the mysterious hat that seemed to appear out of nowhere. I do this in part because I said I would a while ago and never got around to it, and in part because I've misplaced the camera cable and can't download any new images right now. I apologize right now for the incredibly crappy pictures. (Consider yourself warned.)

But first, a quick thanks to Pam, a very nice lady with a very cute dog, judging by her blog, who left a comment on my last post (I love comments! And this is not exactly a popular blog, so I'm thrilled whenever I get them. Except maybe for the real estate spam a while back, but I digress...). Pam asked how my Malabrigo scarf is coming along. When I find my camera cord, I'll show you, but I love it. Now, it's just the mistake rib scarf--I still haven't gone back to "my so-called scarf"--but it's so soft, and the colors seem to fall in a very pleasing, random manner--no big pools or flashes. Of course, now that I've typed that, it'll probably be nothing but pooling and flashing from here on out. I'm not sure how long it'll be when I'm done, but I'm over halfway there, since I've joined the second skein (and I only have two).

I had hoped to finish this before I went to NY, but I was concerned about bringing the aluminum needles on the plane, and we were so busy on vacation that every time I sat down to knit, I'd fall asleep. It was a great vacation!

Okay. On to the hat. You may remember this:

I never actually intended to knit this hat. Having pretty much finished the scarf for my dbf, I wanted to make a hat for him. I decided it would be much easier if I could do it top down, but wasn't really sure how to start. After doing a little Web surfing, I found Susan Pierce Lawrence's site, where she has instructions for her top-down "Live Dangerously, Don't Swatch" hat (if you're following the link, scroll down to November 21, and then follow the instructions up. It turns out you can also buy a nice PDF of the instructions on http://knittingasfastasican.com/category/hats--again, scroll down.).

I grabbed a skein of a wool/hemp blend I had laying around to try out the cast on. I was worried that it was going to leave a hole in the top, so I needed to do enough knitting to see if I could pull the starting point closed tightly.

I struggled a bit, but a little more Web surfing yielded great instructions for the slip knot crochet cast on in the Jennifer Tallapaneni's Topi pattern on knitty.com (which I'm also going to make one of these days).

Once I got enough knitting going to confirm that I could pull the slip knot closed tightly, it seemed a shame to just rip it out, so I kept going. It got a little boring, so I borrowed the chart from another of Susan's hats, Amber, which was published on MagKnits. Since I was knitting in the round, I attempted Meg Swanson's "jogless jog". I don't remember if it was in Interweave Knits or Knitter's Magazine. I'll try to find it again if you're interested. This looks like a reasonable basic tutorial, though.

Not perfect, but not bad. I thought I had a picture... I'll have to take another one later. Anyway, I do think it's better than it would have been without the technique, but I don't really like that it moves your starting point over with each color change. I'll get over it.

And then, since I like a brim, I did basic ribbing until I couldn't stand it anymore. And managed to mess it up. (It's just under my thumb.)

And fix it.

Done.